Submitted Papers - 2016

"A Considerable Degree of Beauty": Nickolas Muray's Photography

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The photographer Nickolas Muray (1892-1965) occupies a lesser-known place in the pantheon of famous 20th century Hungarian emigré photographers. While other Hungarians, including Kertész, Capa, Munkácsi and Moholy-Nagy, still enjoy celebrity status, Muray’s work has remained relatively obscure. He enjoyed a notably successful lifelong career, both as a portrait photographer and as an innovator in the development of color photography and its commercial applications.

Born in Szeged in 1892, Muray emigrated to the US in 1913. Once he began working in New York City, he became an active participant in the lively group of Hungarian expatriate Greenwich Village artists in the 1920’s.

His early photographic work brought him great success. Vanity Fair magazine frequently commissioned him to make portraits of well known contemporary subjects, including dignitaries both in the US and abroad, writers, artists, dancers and actors from stage and screen, including Hollywood stars.

He traveled to Mexico in the 1930’s. where he met Frida Kahlo. Their clandestine love affair lasted over 30 years. His portraits of the now iconic artist Frida are among his finest and best known works.

Nickolas Muray’s contributions to the field of photography are now long overdue and deserving of re-evaluation.




Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Joyce Berczik Corbett is a research scholar specializing in the decorative arts and folk art of Central Europe, She has curated exhibitions at Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA including: "Between East and West: Folk Art Treasures of Romania" (2010-2011)(co-authored catalog), Hungarian Folk Magic: the Art of Joseph Domjan" (2008)(directed documentary video accompanying exhibition), "Eva Zeisel: Extraordinary Designer Craftsman at 100” (2006-2007) traveled to the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles. CA. (2007) “Dowry: Eastern European Painted Furniture, Textiles and Folk Art” (1999)(co-authored catalog), She is on the International Advisory Board of Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA.She received an M.F.A in Art History and Studio Art, from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she held a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship. She has received IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board) research grants for Romania and Hungary and was a Fulbright Research Scholar to Hungary and the Slovak Republic. She is currently conducts independent research on 20th century Hungarian expatriate artists.

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Inclusion and Exclusion: A Lesson From the Hungarian Revolution

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The paper will deal with the physical, ideological and psychological aspects of dislocation in migrant and emigre communities, specifically Hungarians who had to flee their homeland in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and settle in the United States. As a child witness who lived through that cataclysmic time, I offer unique insights into the dynamics of ethnic communities and the process of acculturation.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Peter J. Hargitai is a retired Senior Lecturer in English from Florida International University, and more recently the Poet Laureate in Gulfport, Florida. He has written an historical novel in the juvenile fiction genre about the Hungarian Revolution titled Daughter of the Revolution published both in English and Hungarian in 2006. His most recent monograph, If Attila Jozsef Were Alive Today is coming out in the Hungarian Quarterly in Budapest. Hargitai is an Associate member of the Academy of American Poets and the Hungarian Writers Union.

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The “Forgotten Generation” - Hungarian refugees in the US 1960-1989

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):

Following the 1956 Revolution forty thousand Hungarian refugees were admitted to the United States in a relatively short period of time. This immigration wave was well organized and supported by the US authorities.


After the brutal suppression of the revolution, Hungary was ruled by the Communist Kádár-regime for several decades. Travel to West was severely limited and only a couple of hundred refugees arrived to the US in this time period, spanning from the 1960s thru 1989, the collapse of Hungary’s Socialist system.


As one of those who left Hungary illegally in this period, I explore why this generation of immigrants is different. How do they see Hungary differently than the 56-ers? I call them the “Forgotten Generation” of Hungarian-American immigrants.


Although refugees of this period were generally better educated than previous immigrant groups, they received less or no US support for resettlement. Many of them felt neglected or sometimes misunderstood by the Hungarian-American community and they harbored conflicted feelings about the Kádár-regime. They had to fight various additional obstacles, among them, Socialist Hungary’s ongoing legal and political maneuvers to convince (or force) them to return to Hungary.


Little research has been done about the Hungarian immigration of this period, and although the number of refugees in this period is much smaller than after 1956, their story and struggles deserve attention.




Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
After receiving degrees in Engineering and Economy, György Lázár came to the US in 1980 on a UNESCO fellowship to complete his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina. He later moved to California’s Silicon Valley and spent the next decades in high-tech consulting. After his retirement he became a contributor to several Hungarian and English language publications. His pieces appear in Élet és Irodalom in Hungarian and at the Hungarian Free Press in English. In the past, he also contributed to galamus.hu and New York based Amerikai Magyar Népszava. He and his wife enjoy spending time in Hungary.

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Szégyelld Magad Orbán!: The poetics of oratory in a performance of Romani Hungarian nation-building

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
On September 13, 2015 as part of a demonstration organized by the Együtt Party to protest the Hungarian government’s handling of the ongoing refugee crisis, Jenő Setét, a prominent Romani Hungarian activist, delivers the speech that is the focus of my ethnopoetic analysis. In this paper, I analyze the occasion of an ethnically marked man (a Romani activist in Hungary) delivering a speech through a marked channel (a political demonstration) via a marked discursive form (oratory) in a performance of Romani Hungarian nation-building composed through the poetics of oratory. Throughout his speech, Setét moves between directly addressing the audience in front of him, quoting politicians who are not present at the demonstration, and performs the sending of messages to the absent politicians whom he quotes. He uses metaphor, parallelisms, and quoted speech to create and break ties between various groups of people and welcomes his audience to respond. Setét is able to display solidarity with all Hungarians – Roma, non-Roma, Hungarians of the past, present, and future (refugees) and even with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at several points – and show that they all belong to Hungary together because of how he poetically indexes the common ground they share. Rather than doing the work of nation-building by emphasizing a friend-enemy binary, but nevertheless pointing out difference along the way, Setét ultimately uses the delivery design of his speech to keep his audience motivated in working together with all Hungarians for a united Hungary and understanding difference as a resource for it.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Nora Tyeklar is a Ph.D. student in linguistic anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. In her work, she considers the forms of language as social action that take place in and through popular representations of refugees alongside refugees’ narratives as performances of remembered violence. That is, through an ethnopoetic approach to assessing refugee narratives, her research examines how such narratives are framed via individual biography and larger social and national discourses in the contexts of resettlement and removal. She has a chapter included in an edited volume entitled Refugee Resettlement in the United States: Language, Policy, Pedagogy published in 2015 by Multilingual Matters.

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VeizerVizerWieserWiezer: The Granite City-Kompolt Connection

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
My presentation will be based on a book I published in April 2015 with the above title. In the early 1900s my grandparents and many others from Kompolt and Hevesmegye came to a neighborhood in Granite City, Illinois--then called Hungary Hollow, now known as Lincoln Place--to work in newly established factories there. Three of my father’s siblings were born in Hungary; he and five others were born in the United States. For more than two generations there was a vibrant Hungarian-American community in Lincoln Place. Its Magyarhaz, constructed in 1926 and still used by the Mexican Honorary Commission, was a center for many cultural events: dances, plays, weddings, and performances by the Hungarian-American Band. It was also used by the other ethnic communities in the neighborhood: Armenians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Mexicans.
I spent a good deal of my childhood listening to stories about the community from my father, who was in 1937 the first ethnic citizen elected to the city’s Board of Aldermen. The first section of the book is a memoir of my father’s family and an account of the early years of the community based on my father’s stories, interviews of Lincoln Place residents conducted by members of an oral history class from SIU-Edwardsville, and wide-ranging research.
The second section of the book recounts my three visits to Kompolt--from 2003 when I found several relatives with whom I have stayed in contact, to 2014 when I studied Hungarian at the Balassi Institute in Budapest for a month before returning to the village. Each visit yielded more information about those who emigrated, those who remained in Kompolt, and those who returned to Kompolt from Granite City. In September the last two years, I have set up a booth at the Lincoln Place Heritage Festival where I share my research with descendants of the original families from Kompolt and others.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Keith Veizer taught literature, composition and creative writing for forty years in the colleges and secondary schools of New Orleans and am now retired. I received a BA in English from the University of Illinois in 1965, an MA in English from the University of Virginia in 1967, and an MFA in Fiction from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1983. Over the years I have published eight short stories and one poem in literary magazines and journals.

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